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Last Ones Left in a Toxic Kansas Town

The last vacant house in an almost-empty town awaits demolition.Credit
Alex Webb/Magnum, for The New York Times

One problem with Treece, Kan., is that the ground keeps caving in. It has happened more than a hundred times over the last century. On most occasions, the subsidences — that’s what the scientists call them — are small, like when a sofa-size crater opened up on 10th Street last year. Other times, they are much worse. In 1966, a 300-foot-wide, 200-foot-deep abyss swallowed up the road out on the edge of town. Somehow no one died.

I first visited Treece in 2010. From the airport in Kansas City, it’s a half-day’s drive down Highway 69, the industrial sprawl giving way to fields of sunflowers and prairie grass. Then you enter a dust bowl, land so flat it’s more like a dustpan — so flat, in fact, that in 2003 researchers discovered that the entire state is flatter than an actual pancake, which the team purchased from one of the IHOPs that dot the landscape. Getting nearer to Treece, there are junk shops and single-wide trailers selling kittens and breeze-box Baptist churches with signs announcing, “Hell Awaits.”

At the entrance to Treece, something strange happens: Mountains appear on the horizon. Except they’re not really mountains. They’re mounds of toxic stone. Gray, treeless monuments to the town’s more profitable past.

According to local legend, Treece was founded by accident. Two accidents, really. The first occurred in 1914, when the Picher Lead Company of Joplin, Mo., sent a crew out to deliver equipment to Oklahoma. When the truck got stuck in the mud between the two towns, the company ordered its workers to drill a hole to pass the time, and the crew unexpectedly hit a thick vein of lead and zinc underground. The company then bought mining leases for the area, creating the town of Picher, Okla. When, a few years later, a Kansas land surveyor accidentally moved the state line four blocks south into Picher, the north side of town became part of Kansas. A wealthy resident called the new town Treece, which also happened to be his last name.

Thousands of people from the Ozarks flocked to the two towns to work the mines. They would haul stones to the surface by the bucketful, then crush and grind them to extract the minerals, dumping the waste — worthless rock called “chat” — in piles across town. By the 1920s, the area was the No. 1 producer of zinc and lead in the country, supplying metal for most of the ammunition in World Wars I and II.

But when the minerals started to run out in the 1960s, the largest mining companies went bankrupt or left, and their workers left, too. By 1981, when the Environmental Protection Agency ranked the area around Treece and Picher as the most contaminated in the country, only a few hundred people remained. By the time I visited, Picher had been abandoned almost entirely, and only 170 residents still lived in Treece with those toxic towers of stone.

The towers are another problem in town. Some of them are 200 feet tall, and their dust, which on breezy days blows across the prairie, still contains enough metal to make blood-lead levels among young children here three times higher than the national average.

Then there’s the water. The local Tar Creek is the color of orange juice, and it smells like vinegar. This is because when the mining companies left, they shut off the pumps that kept abandoned shafts from filling with groundwater. Once water flooded the tunnels, it picked up all the trace minerals underground — iron, lead and zinc — and flushed them into rivers and streams. Fish and fowl fled or went belly-up. “The only thing polluted in Treece,” says Rex Buchanan, interim director at the Kansas Geological Survey, “is the earth, air and water.”

A local couple, Dennis and Ella Johnston, agreed to give me the pollution tour. In Dennis’s blue Chevy truck, we drove through downtown — a church, trailers, a one-room City Hall with a pair of its windows boarded up — and then went down a dirt road to a pool formed by a caved-in mine. “Local kids used to skinny-dip here all the time,” Dennis said, grinning and pointing at the glassy water. “We’d see kids with sunburns all over their bodies.” But it turns out the kids hadn’t been burned by the sun, he said; they had been chemically burned by all the acids in the water.

“Things have gone pretty far downhill here,” Mayor Bill Blunk told me when I met him later that day at City Hall. Blunk, a 53-year-old with tattooed arms and a few missing teeth, apologized for the boarded-up windows: someone had smashed them out with rocks, so he nailed plywood over the glass. He explained that in the past year he’d taken to mowing the whole town’s grass himself, and because the police didn’t come here anymore, he patrolled the streets some nights with a “kazillion-watt spotlight.” But now there was no point, he said, because “it was time to get the hell out of Dodge.”

There are 112 sites like Treece on the E.P.A.’s National Priorities List, an inventory of the most environmentally devastated places in the country. They’re in varying states of restoration, but all of them were ruined by mining or extracting operations. Near Jefferson, N.C., a dam holding mining waste from abandoned copper mines is in serious danger of eroding or collapsing, and nearby rivers have already been poisoned. And at the Midnite Mine on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State, years of digging for uranium have left piles of toxic rock on the landscape. Locals are safe enough living there — as long as they don’t eat the radioactive wild berries or the deer that forage on them. What’s tricky about all these places is that they’re not like Three Mile Island, where lives are immediately threatened by a catastrophic accident. It’s not quite clear if they should be cleaned up or abandoned or if there’s some other kind of solution.

Photo

Della Busby and her husband are the only remaining residents of Treece.Credit
Alex Webb/Magnum, for The New York Times

Here in Treece, the E.P.A. and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment had just approved a buyout plan. The two agencies were going to use $3.5 million to get each and every resident to abandon the town. Then they were going to demolish all the buildings, fill in all the caves, replant native grass and turn Treece into a “wildlife preserve,” a grassy tabula rasa that would attract turkeys and quail and deer and wild prairie chickens — just like before the mining companies ever came. It was an ambitious plan and, many locals believed, a necessary one. The future of Treece’s residents depended on their town’s erasure.

To emphasize that point, Blunk showed me a map tacked to the wall. Made by the United States Geological Survey, it showed the town from above, a photo of its streets and homes veined with hundreds of squiggling lines, each one representing a confirmed tunnel beneath us, some as deep as 450 feet. “I don’t want to scare you,” Blunk said, putting his thumb over a smudge on the map and flashing me his gaping mayor’s smile, “but we’re literally standing over our graves right now.”

A year passed before I made it back to Treece. By then, Blunk and his neighbors had made good on their promise to leave. Downtown looked terrible. Tepees of twisted boards stood where 12 months earlier there were two-room cabins; the roof of a tin trailer was peeled nearly off, like the torn-back lid of a sardine can. At City Hall, the plywood over the windows had been stolen and the rest of the glass smashed.

A few blocks away, I saw an immaculate double-wide trailer on a flowery corner lot. Its owners — Della Busby, a shovel-jawed woman with short bangs like Bettie Page’s and a raspy smoker’s growl, and her husband, Tim — had refused the buyout. Treece’s official population was now just two people. “To be honest, I don’t know why everyone left,” Della told me when I found her on her porch later that morning, still in the pink pajama pants and Las Vegas T-shirt she’d slept in. “Despite the obvious, it’s kind of nice out here. I’ve got the place to myself.”

She smoked and rocked in her chair as she explained to me why she decided to stay. (Tim didn’t like reporters and remained in the bedroom while we talked.) For starters, she couldn’t believe how low her buyout offer was. It arrived in the mail in February 2011, and she read it on her front lawn: “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Busby . . . It will be necessary to buy your property.” The offer was for $28,000. They had three months to accept or decline.

They paid only $7,000 for the place in 1985, but they put 25 years of work into cleaning the soil, which was littered with chat and burned television sets when they first moved in as newlyweds, and they had since moved two new trailer-homes onto the land. Besides, Della earned just above minimum wage as a clerk at a nearby craft store, and Tim did odd handyman jobs for his neighbors but was otherwise unemployed. Twenty-eight thousand dollars wasn’t going to do them much good when the average cost of a home in noncontaminated towns nearby was far higher than that (real estate prices shot up around the time the buyouts were announced).

The Busbys weren’t the only ones whose buyout offers made it tough for them to leave. One young couple, the Powells on Main Street, received a $19,000 offer for their house, which was enough for moving costs and a year’s rent in a nearby apartment but not a comparable home. Another resident, 70-year-old Verla Baird, was O.K. with her $28,000 offer, but before she signed the papers to make the exchange official, her trailer burned down. With no insurance and now just a pile of smoldering ashes for a home, the K.D.H.E. revised its offer. She got just $9,300 for her land and took out a loan to cover the remaining expense of moving to a place 10 miles away in Baxter Springs, Kan.

Even though a group of eight residents, led by Mayor Blunk, had lobbied the state Senate for the buyout, this didn’t mean everyone wanted to go. From the winter of 2010 deep into the spring of 2011, Treece residents regularly attended meetings to air their grievances to the five trustees of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, as well as to a sixth man, an affable, moon-faced guy named Bob Jurgens who coordinated the day-to-day details of the buyout.

At the earliest meetings, extra chairs had to be brought in to accommodate the crowds. Sometimes people complained that the E.P.A.’s trucks were stirring up too much dust, and wasn’t the agency just wasting money cleaning up the town since it was being abandoned anyway? Other times they were curious about Dumpsters: would there be enough of them so that when folks left they’d have a convenient place to trash their stuff? And other times it was hotel rooms — if someone moved their mobile home out of Treece, but it wasn’t ready for them to sleep in right away, would the K.D.H.E. pay for a night’s stay in the Econo Lodge?

“I don’t think that’s even been addressed,” Jurgens said on one particularly tense Thursday evening. “But I don’t think that’s going to be an option.”

“O.K.,” Jurgens said, “I’m not from here, so I’m not going to pretend that I understand what it’s like to live here.”

At the front of the room, Mayor Blunk was nervously chewing on a pen next to his wife, Judy. She stood up. “You’re talking about our homes, Bob,” she said. “But you’re also talking about a void, a void where our home is soon going to be, a void in our hearts. . . . Supposedly, we don’t have to go. But I feel like we’re being forced to.”

As the summer of 2011 approached, only 60 people had accepted their offers. Others explored the option of creating a newly chartered town, composed of the residents who didn’t want to leave. The K.D.H.E. was alarmed by how many people said they planned to stay. “We wanted a 100 percent buyout,” Jurgens told me. So, in March, they raised everyone’s offer by at least $5,000.

When the Busbys got another letter in the mail offering them $33,000, Della thought, Well, I’ll be damned. She and Tim really considered taking it and even went house shopping. They found a place they liked — a fixer-upper in Commerce, Okla., with crooked floors and mildewed walls. But it was $59,000, way out of their range. That’s when they decided to stay put for good.

By the time the K.D.H.E. raised the offers for the holdouts yet again, Della had accepted — even come to like — the prospect of a future in Treece. The new offer of $44,500, she says, wasn’t tempting in the slightest. “Sure, you could say I’m stubborn,” she said. “If my house falls into a hole, then it falls into a hole.”

“I wish Della had moved out of that falling-down town,” Pam Pruitt, the Treece City Clerk and Della’s friend, said. Pruitt lived just a few blocks from Della, but she’d already accepted her adjusted buyout offer of $62,400 and purchased a new home in Baxter Springs. She wanted to move out as soon as possible. “We needed to start over again. And some of us needed a push.”

As their neighbors prepared to leave, the Busbys prepared for life in a ghost town. They didn’t just need a hearty frontier mentality — they also needed $5,000 to pay for a new water system and septic tank to replace all the utilities that would soon be shut off. The Busbys used their entire savings to do it.

Not long after, the gas company stopped serving Treece. The water tower was drained by cranking open a fire hydrant in town, soaking the streets in 5,000 gallons of drinking water. Empire District Electric unstrung all the street lights. There had been three other families saying they’d stay behind with the Busbys, but with the utilities gone, even they saw no use in hanging around.

In August, there was an auction of the abandoned properties. The poster placed around town by the Chesnutt & Chesnutt auction company announced that everything must go — “even the water tower,” which now sat empty and idle on the south side of town.

Colonel Jerry, the lead auctioneer, drove into Treece wearing snakeskin boots and a straw cowboy hat.

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Contaminated rock just over the border in Picker, Okla.Credit
Alex Webb/Magnum, for The New York Times

“How do you feel about auctioning off an actual town?” one of the people there for the sale asked him.

“I feel fine,” Colonel Jerry said, as he sat down on the steps of City Hall. “We’ve auctioned off exotic animals.”

Colonel Jerry stood up, brushed off his pants and cleared his throat. He walked over to a microphone and addressed the 100 buyers assembled in the gravel parking lot of City Hall. “All right, people,” he said, “we’re going to start the auction here in the heart of America, beautiful downtown Treece, Kansas. . . .” And in less than an hour, the artifacts of collective life in Treece were sold as scrap:

• Jesus Name Pentecostal Church on Main Street, including each of its 11 pews: $50

It’s never been so peaceful around here,” Della told me a few months after the auction. She had the day off from work — the crafts store where she is a clerk is a 10-mile drive away in Baxter Springs — and we were sitting out on her porch, smoking cigarettes. The view was beautiful in its way: trees, undulating fields of sand, unearthly mounds and ruined prairie, all shaded pink by a setting sun.

The K.D.H.E. had hired wrecking crews to demolish the last few buildings in town. Among other concerns, they feared meth dealers would set up labs in empty homes, which is what happened years earlier when Picher was abandoned. The demo team only had a handful of houses to bulldoze before their work in Treece was done. Just to be safe, the Busbys had a “Do Not Demolish” sign staked in their yard.

“I’m not worried about vandals or scary people or cave-ins or lead poisoning or chat towers,” Della told me. “Even though it looks bad around here, no one’s ever died from any of that stuff.” And it was true — while it was definitely dangerous for children to live in Treece, and while a lead-toxicology specialist told me that Treece residents were “almost certainly” poisoned by their environment, and while nearly everyone I interviewed offered anecdotes about friends or family suffering from lupus, multiple sclerosis, thyroid disease, cancer, eczema or emphysema, no scientific study has conclusively linked these diseases to pollution in Treece. Of course, no comprehensive scientific study has ever been conducted in Treece. The first and only official lead test in children wasn’t carried out by the K.D.H.E. and the E.P.A. until 2009.

This April, officials abandoned their plan to turn Treece into a wildlife preserve. It had been a quixotic hope all along, dependent upon the desire of the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism, which had nothing to do with the buyout, to take over the land from the Department of Health and Environment. The Wildlife Department wouldn’t give an official statement, but one employee told me the agency wasn’t interested in the land. “It’s not because that couple stayed,” he said, referring to the Busbys. “Not only because of that, anyway. That land is inadequate for supporting wildlife, or from what I hear, any other kind of life.”

Instead, another auction will be held this fall. The now-barren plots of land will be sold to buyers who can use the space to hunt deer and rabbits, or to grow crops (at their own risk). The land won’t be cleaned up further except to dismantle the remaining chat towers by hauling the stones away and using them to fill local cave-ins, where the effects of airborne lead are mitigated. This could take years.

The state recently petitioned to remove the town’s name from maps. The “welcome” sign out on U.S.-69 has been taken down, and a visitor today couldn’t find the place unless she already knew the way. The Busbys will be allowed to stay in the ghost town as long as they like, but once they leave or die, it’s very likely that no human will ever live in Treece again.

I was curious how Mayor Blunk was coping with the end of his town, so I visited him and Judy at their mobile home in February. They had relocated to a grassy stretch of highway in Columbus, Kan., about 10 miles north of where they used to be. Blunk said that he was fond of certain aspects of his new life here. He liked that if someone tried to break into his house, the police would actually come. He liked that he didn’t have to drive 20 minutes to find a grocery store or gas station. He liked that he didn’t have to see chat towers outside his window. And he said he didn’t regret asking people to leave Treece or helping to make the buyout a reality, because he knew, in the end, “we couldn’t stay in our sick little town forever.”

But he said that he missed being mayor and that he had underestimated how strange it would be to have his hometown erased, to be “plucked from his roots like a potato.” His dad was a miner in Treece and Picher. His whole family grew up there. He didn’t know quite what to do without his fellow “chat rats,” he said, and he had even taken to cruising around Treece with his kazillion-watt spotlight, “just for kicks.”

I asked him what he saw out there on his drives.

Blunk took a sip of coffee and let the question linger for a while. “I see an opportunity for a decent place to live,” he said. “Not a great place, maybe not even a good place, but a decent place to live — and now it’s gone down the drain.”

Correction: June 10, 2012

An article on May 20 about the town of Treece, Kan., misidentified Mayor Bill Blunk as a Vietnam veteran. It also referred erroneously to U.S.-69 as I-69.